What Sound System for KDE 4

[Matthias Kretz]

On Friday 13 August 2004 23:44, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
> As I see it there are two seperate issues: The standard system for
> audio-playback, and a whole multimedia-framework, kdelibs only needs to
> depend on the first! As it is looks, the wisest move would be to define an
> audio-interface in kdelibs, and let various backends provide plugins for
> it.

That's what I was thinking for quite some time now. Of course it's not an easy 
task at all. We don't want to invent a new media-framework but as soon as you 
start on abstracting other frameworks into one interface you almost start 
doing that and get tempted to do it all by yourself far too easily.

So yes, there should be some "simple" API that can be used to do the basic 
things:
- raw PCM output (probably not needed a lot in KDE programs, but a must have 
nevertheless)
- play audio files (wav, ogg, mp3, whatever; the problem here: we need the 
media-framework to do the decoding)
This API could then be used by "simple" games and knotify and perhaps the 
Sound Preview in Konq. Media-Players probably would like to use more 
functionality of the media-framework.

Wrapping one Framework (e.g. NMM or GStreamer) in a KDE API could be one (and 
probably the easier) option. But to keep our possibilities open I'd like to 
see an abstraction of several Frameworks, and backends for at least GStreamer 
and aRts (we'd want to have that for compatibility).
There should be a central place (KControl) to configure the sound output 
(direct kernel I/O or Soundserver: Jack, MAS, aRts) and what Media-Framework 
Backend to use (dunno if we want to let the user decide on this, but why 
not).
Applications should be able to access the Media-Framework directly (without 
the KDE layer) to have access to the full functionality of the framework.

Also I hope we can write a Mixer API so that sound streams can be mixed 
independently. You might want to turn up your sound system because you're 
listening to some classical music and then the Kopete_Received sound bangs 
through your speakers...

So much for dreams. :-) I hope we can start making reality out of them at 
aKademy.

-- 
C'ya
        Matthias
________________________________________________________
Matthias Kretz (Germany)                          <><
http://Vir.homeip.net/
MatthiasKretz at gmx.net, kretz at kde.org,
Matthias.Kretz at urz.uni-heidelberg.de
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